Cinematic italy
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top: Baarìa (2009) by Giuseppe Tornatore. Below: Gomorrah (2008) by Matteo Garrone; Sean Penn in This Must Be The Place (2011) by Paolo Sorrentino; Will Smith and Jaden Smith in The Pursuit of Happiness (2006) by Gabriele Muccino.
Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, brilliantly played by Toni Servillo. Such was the international success of Il Divo that three years later Sorrentino was given the chance to direct his first English-language feature, the tragicomic road movie This Must Be the Place, starring Sean Penn as a bizarre 50-year-old-former rock star. We end this journey into the internationally acclaimed contemporary Italian filmmakers with two film directors who, for better or for worse, have tasted the “American Dream”: Emanuele Crialese and Gabriele Muccino. After studying filmmaking at the New York University and directing a series of short films, Crialese made his feature-film debut with Once We Were Strangers (1997), an
Italian-American co-production where his visionary and sensuous talent was already evident. After the international success of Respiro (Grazia’s Island, 2002) and Nuovomondo (Golden Door, 2006), both set in Sicily, his fourth feature film, Terraferma (“Dry Land”, 2011), deals with the thorny subject of African immigration into Sicily, and received a standing ovation at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, where he won the Special Jury Prize. As for Gabriele Muccino, he seems to have no intention to leave Hollywood. After The Pursuit of Happiness (2007) and Seven Pounds (2009), in 2011 he directed his third “American” film, a romantic comedy about football, Playing the Field (2012), starring actors of the caliber of Ge-
rard Butler, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jessica Biel, Uma Thurman and Dennis Quaid. Most well known for his sentimental pictures, which combine drama, comedy and old-style melodrama, he achieved success with L’ultimo bacio (“One Last Kiss”, 2001), a cynical and disenchanted reflection on the difficulties of sentimental relationships, which won the Audience Award for World Cinema at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and brought him to the attention of the American film industry. The film, ranked by “Entertainment Weekly” among the top ten movies of the year, was later remade into The Last Kiss (2006) by Tony Goldwyn, which was however deemed by the critics as inferior to the Italian original. n